Posts Tagged "interactivity"

Much of transmedia campaigns rely on the willingness of the audience to participate, which is generally influenced by the level of immersion in the campaign. In alternate reality games (ARGs), the level of immersion is high because if there are no interested players, the game will not be very successful. In transmedia campaigns like The Lizzie Bennet Diaries, although audience participation is not necessary for the story, viewers are encouraged to ask the characters questions and interact with them through various social media means in order to add a level of realness and to more fully immerse the viewers. For many, interactivity does not end with the end of an ARG or the end of an Internet show. There can be groups of fans who decide that whatever text they were engaged in has more to offer. This is where Twitter shines. From December 10-15, 2010, the Geek Squad did a live-tweet session of the movie Home Alone. The television show, The West Wing, ended in 2006. There are over 30 Twitter accounts for different characters from the show that tweet and interact with each other. Although the West Wing accounts are a better example of a completely immersive transmedia, the Home Alone accounts have their own strength and are still an excellent example of how levels of immersion can vary in transmedia, and thus influence the success of the campaign. The television show, The West Wing, followed President Josiah (Jed) Bartlet and his staff through his years in the White House. Although there are over 30 Twitter accounts for various characters from various periods on the show, the most prolific Tweeters are Josh Lyman, the Deputy Chief of Staff (@joshualyman); his wife and former secretary, Donna Moss (@donatella_moss); and President Bartlet (@pres_bartlet). These accounts are run by anonymous people. This is one of the main strengths of The West Wing accounts: they maintain the reality of the characters. The writers of these accounts do not publicize their own names or identities. In an interview with the magazine Entertainment Weekly, “Josh Lyman,” discussed his inspiration for creating the account and commitment to the character of Josh. The account writer told Entertainment Weekly, “I am strict about breaking character and...

To the casual observer, YouTube is nothing more than a website hosting videos of cats, crazy Russian drivers, pranks, and the occasional birth of a meme (remember the Harlem Shake?). However, to a YouTuber, whether a content creator or consumer (sometimes both), this website and its endless supply of videos is a community like no other, with its foundation firmly set in interactivity. This is where movies and TV shows fall short: a story is being told to you, but you have no ability to provide feedback or help to shape the story. Furthermore, as much as you love these characters and obsess over them, you only know them from a distance, from what the plot lets you know. Sure, there’s fan fiction, and if it’s transmedia, then there is content elsewhere for you to engage with to get even more of the story. Still, it’s all happening at a distance and much of your interactivity and effect on the events is just helping to move the pre-determined plot along. While there is transmedia on YouTube such as the Pronunciation Book, The Lizzie Bennet Diaries, and more recently, Emma Approved, the community spans far past just the expansion of fictions. Vlogging (video blogging) has become one of the biggest fads on the site, becoming a lucrative career for a bunch of average people who thought it would be fun to pick up a camera and talk about their lives to a bunch of people on the internet that they didn’t know. The more successful YouTubers usually post a new video each week, with some doing so several times. Charles and Alli Trippy of YouTube channel CTFxC hold up their world record for most consecutive days vlogged. (c) 2013 Josiah Van Dien A few have championed “daily vlogging,” which is the posting of one vlog composed of footage from their day, each day. Two channels, SHAYTARDS and CTFxC have been doing this for five years now with Charles and Alli Trippy of CTFxC recently winning a Guinness World Record for daily vlogging consecutively for the most days. Over the years of watching this charismatic personalities live their lives talking into a camera, their fans have grown to feel like distance...

Reading traditional newspapers seems to be really old fashioned. Since news could reach us on our mobile phone many things have changed. News has followed a pattern from paper to tablet, from words to images and video, from simply reading the news to be part of their creation. The old traditional paper media is not enough anymore, we need many platforms to feel informed. What is really new in what I’d like to define as Transmedia Journalism? According to the Nieman Lab, the “Drudge Report” was the first online journal to have real success. It was 1998 and Matt Drudge, its founder,had the courage to publish an article about what would have become the Monica Lewinsky scandal. The “Newsweek” waited too much and lost its opportunity. Online beat paper for the first time: Speed is one of our key words. What about “The Huffington Post”? HuffPost was born in 2005 thanks to Arianna Huffington, Kenneth Lerer and Jonah Peretti. it is described as “one part social network, one part news content site” by the CEO Eric Hippeau. Networking and Interactivity are the basis of this online news aggregator as confirm Micheal Shapiro in his interesting article about the HuffPost. So far we have some elements that seem to distinguish transmedia journalism: Speed, Networking and Interactivity. There are so many news coming from different media: newspapers, television, and the Internet. We can’t follow everything, there is an information overload so how could we find and select what is really interesting for us? Jonathan Stray in his article “Who should see what when? Three principles for personalized news” explains that every person has unique interests, is uniquely affected by larger events and has a unique capacity to act. So we should read a news story if it interests us, if we are affected by it, and if we are able to do something for it. Customized or Personalized Journalism has been created to help people find what they want through the enormous amount of information they have. But what is Customized Journalism? According to Matt Schlicht it is “a service that passively delivers and recommends prioritized content to the user based on their ever changing interest and social graph.” It seems...